Description:

Anastasiia Evdokimova (Northwestern): "Access to Internet and Healthcare"

Abstract: The Internet provides unregulated and sometines biased health-related information (e-health); therefore, its impact on healthcare demand is questioned. By modeling a learning process that accounts for the functional dependence between the interpretation of the newly recieved information and prior beliefs about health conditions, I've shown that, on average, patients inefficiently over-visit physicians once they use e-Health. The effect is heterogeneous and depends on the patient's sensitivity to the uncertainty of being in an ill state. The introduction of a social planner, who solves the same learning problem but accounts for the possible overburden of the healthcare system, allows me to compute the gap between optimal solutions from the social planner's and the agent's perspective and motivate policy implications.